The B2B Data Deduplication Dilemma

All business to business (B2B) sales and marketing efforts are hinged on data. Without company and B2B contact data, a B2B marketer cannot run demand generation, lead nurturing, or marketing campaign programs. Within the last 5 years, B2B marketing professionals, compelled by the explosion of big data, have clamored for more and more data points to make better prospecting and targeting decisions. A newer data point gaining popularity is customer base or product install base data.

The demand for data has been growing as evidenced by the growth of on demand B2B data platforms and data service providers. But as marketers acquire more data and as sales professionals add data into their CRMs, a new challenge has emerged — maintaining one source of truth. Bringing all that data together and ensuring that there is only one latest and greatest record for a company or contact is a massive challenge. A CRM can have multiple versions of the same company or account name:

IBM

International Business Machines

IBM Inc

IBM Incorporated

IBM Corporation

Similarly an acquired account list may potentially have the same issues.

Merging both lists would compound the problem even further, combining the CRM entries with the list purchased from a data vendor. The list owner, typically the B2B marketer or CRM admin, has to dedupe the list. When there is no other data point but the company name, this process becomes very frustrating. A simple deduplication will not do anything.

A company website or domain is often the best way to normalize such a list. For this reason, maintaining the company website field or domain field is a recommended best practice for company records. There is typically only one unique domain per company, as opposed to multiple company names.

Another, but more complex alternative solution is to maintain an alias table or company-alternate-name mapping against a master company name. However, this type of “roll-up” will take much more time and resources to build and maintain.

When evaluating on demand B2B data platforms, a B2B marketer should take a close look at sample records to ensure that the platform’s company records will not add duplication problems and pollute the existing CRM or Marketing Automation list. The B2B marketer should also take into consideration data quality and how the vendor maps their company records to improve B2B data deduplication, making it a simpler and less painful process.

Jean is part of the B2BSignals product team and contributes to product marketing, product positioning and messaging, competitive intelligence, sales enablement, product strategy and content marketing. She is also part of the team developing Market Insights, B2BSignals' new and exciting product feature that allows high level marketers to spot never before seen insights and opportunities within their market.